“If the future of media is cable, digital and global, this combination serves all three,” he said.

Steve Burke, Comcast’s operating chief, echoed the sentiment, saying the deal creates a collection of online properties that see about 82 million unique visitors a month.

“We believe the combined company will be the No. 1 provider of women and lifestyle Internet content, the No. 3 provider of news, the No. 3 provider of entertainment, the No. 7 provider of sports, and obviously, with the growth that we are seeing in online advertising and digital in general, having these kind of positions, we think, is real scale and real growth opportunity in the future,” he said.

It will also appeal to advertisers seeking those audiences, Mr. Burke added. The two companies will be able to offer them, for example, a female demographic, through the Bravo and Oxygen channels and NBC’s iVillage and Comcast’s Daily Candy sites.

He and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts fielded several questions about Hulu, the online-video site jointly owned by NBC, News Corp. and Disney. “We see, with more distributors and more technologies, what consumers want. We want to be part of delivering to them,” Mr. Roberts said. “The reality is consumers want electronic distribution. Some of it, they want it for free. Some of it, they want it in subscription, and some of it, they want it pay-per-view.”

He said there are no plans to alter Hulu’s free model. “That is certainly not in the cards,” he said when an analyst asked if a “Hulu Premium” is a possibility.

“Right now, NBC Universal is distributing a lot of their broadcast content on Hulu, and they have been quite careful not to put too much of their paid-for-cable content out for free over the Internet. We think both those strategies are smart and appropriate — not that they asked us,” he said. “I think right now, the way NBC Universal are managing those two ways of distributing are very similar to the way we would want to do it when the two companies come together.”